I expect on the personal level a stroke has that quality, and I know I have an uneasiness about it that probably causes me more slight but actual psychic or spiritual discomfort than the thought of death itself. Death is as large and as final a transmogrification as one could ever find, but we spend our lives thinking about death, or trying to, whereas a stroke shunts us off to a siding. So from the above you can understand that I commiserate with you.
Reading in his seventy-fifth year almost everything that he had published in book form over the previous half century produced contrary emotions. He enjoyed passages of his writing that he had forgotten, but he also realized how much his powers had diminished. The result was melancholy. Another cause for gloom was his eyesight. He had cataracts, but the doctor told him he should wait until the fall to have them removed. “It’s a little like Vaseline has been rubbed over the lens,” he told his Providence friend Ed McAlice. Mike Lennon, who was helping Mailer assemble the collection, sent him over two thousand pages culled from his books, all of them blown up 100 percent, from which to make his selections. Mailer expected and accepted that the anthology would be seen as a farewell gesture.
The volume, now titled The Time of Our Time (an echo of his 1958 short story “The Time of Her Time”) was finished around Labor Day 1997. Writing to an old friend, Edith Atkin, he said that the new book would be “a commemorative work. It isn’t enough that I advertise myself, now I’m going to ‘commemorate’ me! Awful!” In a Random House Q and A to herald TOOT, as Mailer took to calling it, and maintain interest in GATT, his nickname for The Gospel According to the Son, Mailer said that “one extremely famous person” he’d like to read GATT was President Clinton, “in the wan hope it will remind him that we are not necessarily put on earth to aid and abet the rich in further enriching themselves.” He also named U.S.A. by John Dos Passos as his model for TOOT, as he said in the acknowledgments and appreciations statement to the book: “Occasionally, since this had become an out-of-category volume influenced by one of the most monumental works of American literature, nothing less than U.S.A., by John Dos Passos, I even took the liberty of improving old sentences.” The most common improvement was to substitute “that” for “which” in numerous places, correcting an inveterate grammatical error that Random House copy editor Veronica Windholz had helped him to recognize. But he also revised many passages, usually cutting more than he added.
Dissatisfied with a topical organization (“equal to a row of potted plants”), as well as one based on order of publication (“useful presentation for a biographer” but of no interest to most readers), Mailer was at an impasse in his first months of work on the anthology. Eventually, he found a solution: with two notable exceptions, the 130-odd episodes from thirty of his books were arrayed along a chronological line from 1929 to 1996 because he decided to place each piece according to the date of the events depicted. “Boxing with Hemingway,” the opening piece (a review of Morley Callaghan’s That Summer in Paris) was published in 1963, but it depicts a 1929 event. The exceptions were excerpts from Ancient Evenings and The Gospel According to the Son, which were tacked on at the end.
World War II is the collection’s armature. The great majority of the episodes demonstrate its direct or indirect influence on events, from the founding of the CIA, the Cold War, rocket technology, Cuba, the Vietnam War, and the assassination of JFK. Commenting on similarities between the film Saving Private Ryan and The Naked and the Dead, Mailer said, “The Second World War was a watershed. Everything is of it, before it or after it. It’s a point of reference. It’s still my point of reference.” Dos Passos’s point of reference, of course, was the First World War. Mailer’s unspoken intention was for The Time of Our Time to continue the narrative begun by Dos Passos, employing many of the narrative tactics, and doing for the second half of the twentieth century what his predecessor did for the first. In his foreword, he says, “There is little in this book, even when it comes under the formal category of non-fiction or argument, that has not derived, then, from my understanding of how one writes fiction.” While Mailer did not go so far as to call his anthology a novel, it is in scope, structure, variety, voice, and “feel” congruent with Dos Passos’s three-volume masterpiece.
The two books are of a size: Mailer’s at 1,286 pages and Dos Passos’s at 1,449. Both use many storytelling modes and handle equally well rapid shifts of narrative focus. Film and journalistic techniques are adapted by both writers, from the “camera eye” of movies to interpolated newspaper articles and headlines, as well as capsule biographies of the great figures of the age. Dos Passos includes profiles of J. P. Morgan, John Reed, and FDR, and Mailer gives sketches of Marilyn Monroe, Abbie Hoffman, and JFK. Various points of view are used, and both books have several touchstone characters. When an interviewer pointed out to Mailer that his collection reminded her of U.S.A., he said he was following Dos Passos’s lead with “the idea of certain characters reappearing in somewhat different circumstances, 30, 40, 200 pages down the road. For example, Gene McCarthy reappears three or four times. Nixon does, Castro does. And some of the fictional characters reappear and reappear. And what I like about it was the nearness of fictional characters to real characters. Of course, Dos Passos was doing that.” Mailer and Dos Passos were the chief novelistic chroniclers of what Henry Luce called the “American Century,” incontestably.
The reception of TOOT was better than for any of his books going back to The Executioner’s Song. Even Kakutani had some kind words and her review appeared two days after the publication date, perhaps in response to Mailer’s letter of complaint. She praised his “quick, observant eye, his gift for the cameo portrait, his radar for atmosphere and mood” in his nonfiction, and called The Executioner’s Song, a “masterpiece.” His novels she summed up as “jerry-built constructions” festooned with obsessive ideas that are “adolescent, irresponsible or just plain flaky.” She concludes that “in the end, he remains his own most intriguing creation.” Harold Bloom made precisely the same point in his warm review of TOOT, saying that Mailer “is above all the author of ‘Norman Mailer,’ his most persuasive fiction.” His remarks about the collection are warmer, however. Very few other writers of the previous fifty years, Bloom states, have been “so endlessly sensitive to the phantasmagoria that is American reality,” an achievement based on Mailer’s love of country, “passionate sincerity,” and an ability to fuse “acute sensibility and intensity with his public concerns.”
One of the most perceptive reviews of the collection is entwined with a profile, which records a visit to Mailer in his third floor study in Provincetown. David Denby had read all or most of Mailer’s books and it is clear that he enjoyed the man and admired the writer, but this side idolatry. Near the beginning of his twelve-page piece in The New Yorker, he gives a sketch of him at seventy-five.
Mailer is looking well. His hearing has faded slightly, and he has some arthritic trouble with his knees. Using a cane, he sways on Provincetown’s streets like a retired sea captain. But he’s lost weight—he’s down to about a hundred and eighty pounds from the rotund two hundred of a few years ago; the loss is partly the result of a complicated diet that commences with a nearly indigestible cabbage soup. (“The elements fight against one another so hard,” he tells me, “that the cells exhaust themselves, and you lose weight.” Mailer is a vitalist in all things, even in weight reduction.) His hair is thinning but snowy white, his forearms are strong, his voice is full; all in all, he still has the look of a barrel-chested elder Jewish sage which he achieved about fifteen years ago. David Ben-Gurion striding through some brave kibbutz gave off a similar robust glow.
The portrait, and other glimpses he gives of Mailer at ease with family and friends and giving a tour of the town, prepares us for an appraisal of the book that transcends the usual reviews.
Denby praises TOOT, saying that no one of Mailer’s generation “could match the book’s variety, its manic energy, its spiritual violence and striving.” It is bo
th “daunting,” he says, and “eccentric,” referring to the book’s unusual organizational principle. He asked Mailer if using the normal method—date of composition—might not have been a better strategy because it would present readers with “a clear spiritual autobiography of Norman Mailer.” Mailer answered with a sigh. “I’ve been waiting to write an autobiographical novel all these years, but I’ve been waiting to become the hero of my own life in order to write it. I have never become the hero of my own life.” One clear reflection of his answer to Denby’s question is the way Mailer limited his presence in TOOT. He excludes most of the self-portraits in his work, especially the nonfiction narratives of 1968–75, The Armies of the Night to The Fight. There is self-reference, but a reasonable quantity. “The main good motive behind this book was my desire to let people separate my work from myself,” he said.
Mailer becomes just another character in the American cavalcade he presents, taking his turn along with Sergeant Croft and McLeod; Monroe and DiMaggio; Herman Teppis and Lulu Meyers; Rojack and Ruta; John and Jacqueline Kennedy; the astronauts; Oswald, his mother, and wife, Marina; Gene McCarthy; Gary and Nicole; Harry Hubbard, Hugh and Kittredge Montague, Modene Murphy; and Sinatra, Nixon, Ali, and Madonna. The glue that holds TOOT together, as Denby points out, is “Mailer’s imagination of history,” and one of the great things about the book is that we “forget which realm we are in—nonfiction or fiction, reality or fantasy—or why any of these categories matter.” As James Campbell has noted, Mailer, like Didion, Vidal, and Baldwin, is a “two-hander,” that is, “adept at both fact and fiction.” His version of the history of the country from World War II to the century’s end, in Denby’s fine metaphor, is “a long, long night in which movie stars, Presidents, intelligence operatives, and gangsters meet in that ideal Mailer after-hours spot where only grownups are allowed to gather and where the music is always insinuating and sweet.” The endless critical discussion about primacy among Mailer’s fiction, history, biography, and journalism gets a one-word answer from TOOT: moot.
Random House threw a large celebratory party at the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center on May 6, 1998. Most family members were in attendance, as well as a number of friends: Plimpton, Styron, Vonnegut, S. I. Newhouse, Lillian Ross (who wrote about the party in The New Yorker), Schiller, Toback, and Lucid. Some younger writers were there, Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis, who said he came because “there will never be another Norman Mailer.” The surprise guests were Muhammad and Lonnie Ali. A hush came over the room when Ali was spotted, and the waiters rushed to get his autograph. He and Mailer mugged for the camera and traded fake jabs. Ali did some magic tricks, and when introduced to people, Lennon recalled, leaned in and said with a smile, “You’re not as dumb as you look.”
For the summer, Mailer planned to see his family and do a lot of reading: Cormac McCarthy’s novels, DeLillo’s latest, Underworld, and as soon as it was available, Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full, which he had agreed to review for the NYRB. He’d also been reading a lot of Jung, including Barbara Hannah’s C. G. Jung: His Life and Work. He intended to stay on in Provincetown for the rest of the year. “In winter, it’s wonderful to wake up and you don’t feel sorry for yourself that you’re missing anything, because nothing is happening,” he said.
His major commitment was the sequel. “I’ve been waiting seven years to be visited by the muse for this second volume. She’s been silent. I’ve been waiting. But now she’s come back. What happened is that I got a major idea. So now, we’ll see.” The idea, he said later, was to make Hugh Montague a Jungian and open the sequel with him living secretly in Moscow. He was considering how he might use Jung’s ideas as a way to avoid writing about the event-crammed 1960s and 1970s, especially the Vietnam War. But by the end of 1998, he still had not written a word of “Harlot’s Grave.”
FIFTEEN
OLD FREIGHTER, UNCERTAIN SEA
The first years of the new millennium were a time of contraction and consolidation for Mailer. He had a new right hip installed in February 2000, and his doctors told him that he should get knee replacements, but he kept putting off the operation. He wore dual hearing aids (and was forever losing them), and walked with two canes to make the dependencies equal, and for “the illusion that you are going in for cross country skiing and poling along.” His waistline was again expanding and his eyesight dimming. After his cataract surgery, he learned that he had the beginnings of macular degeneration. He took nitroglycerin tablets for angina. The sum of these ailments “leaves me cheerful and chirpy, however,” he wrote to Lois Wilson. “I figure the daily pains enable me to pay off my bad karma on the installment plan. Rest assured—you are a part of the good karma.” He had taken to describing himself as an “old guy with slits in his sneakers,” more of a geezer than a hipster. Norman Mailer had grown old.
His health problems were age-related and not immediately threatening; his wife’s were more severe. In 1999 she had a hysterectomy, but the doctor removed only one of her fallopian tubes, and she soon learned that there were cancerous tumors on the other. Several operations and both chemotherapy and radiation treatments followed. When she went on a book tour for her first novel in 2000, she wore a wig, having lost all her beautiful red hair. For the next ten years, as the tumors spread, Norris battled cascading illnesses, and did so with stoic grace and a dash of gallows humor.
Windchill Summer, her coming-of-age murder mystery novel, was written before she met Mailer. She described it as “a story about boys going to Vietnam and the toll it took on them and everyone close to them.” She began it at Arkansas Tech shortly after her husband, Larry Norris, shipped out for Vietnam. Mailer had not been complimentary about it when he read the manuscript shortly after they began living together. In the late 1990s, having learned a good deal about the craft, Norris began an entirely new version.
She had a studio adjacent to his on the third floor of their Provincetown home, and to communicate with him, one would e-mail her, and she would walk ten steps into his space with the message. Otherwise, they worked separately, he writing, and she painting or handling the family finances. But after she began writing, she talked to him about technical matters, and then asked if he would read her unfinished manuscript. He said no. “I told her that if I read it, and she didn’t finish it she would never forgive me. And she nodded. She’s fairly tough-minded.” When the page proofs arrived, he said that perhaps it was time to take a look at it, and she agreed.
After an hour of reading, he handed her his initial edits. Amazed to see that he was line editing her novel, she bridled. “No. You can’t edit this book. I have to be able to say that I wrote the whole thing myself. I don’t want you to edit it,” she said. “Our styles are too different.” When asked, “Do we influence each other?” he said:
Not all that much. We are both very stubborn. She’s got a whole set of attitudes and values that don’t match with mine at all. When it comes to literature, particularly, we are very far apart. She wouldn’t read Proust if I put a gun to her head! She loves bestsellers. And I hate bestsellers. My favorite writer is Tolstoy. I don’t mind these differences. By now I know that you never get the woman of your dreams. Nor is there a dream man. But as long as there is a balance, it may work. Of course it’s difficult to be married to a writer. Writers are as egocentric as any artists. Because the more talented the artist, the more he is in love with something else than the woman: his work.
Norris’s self-assessment in regard to literature matches Mailer’s. She said more than once that she preferred People magazine to The New York Review of Books. The primacy of his work was obvious to her, and the entire family.
Mailer told her that if he couldn’t edit her novel as he went along, then he couldn’t read it. “Fine,” she replied. “Then you’ll either read it when it comes out or you won’t read it.” He handed her back the proofs. “I never even looked at what he had done. I know there were a lot of people who would have given three years of their lives if Norman
Mailer would have edited their manuscripts, but I was not one of them.” When asked how he’d have edited the novel, he said, “I could have made it about five percent better. That’s all though. The book was essentially there.” Norris had made her point. Her novel was a modest success, with generally warm reviews, good sales, and a paperback edition. It is dedicated to her husband and two sons.
ABOUT THE SAME time that Windchill Summer appeared, Tom Wolfe published Hooking Up, an essay collection. It included a full-throated attack on three novelists who had found fault with his 1998 novel, A Man in Full. Titled “My Three Stooges,” the essay accuses Mailer, Updike, and John Irving of wasting their careers by pursuing private obsessions instead of exploring “the rich material of an amazing country at a fabulous moment in history.” Wolfe’s long-held contention was that the American novel had fallen into a “weak, pale, tabescent condition”—a view for which Mailer had some sympathy—that could be remedied only by sending “a brigade of Zolas” out to document the raw life of a fast-changing, unpredictable country. He was happy to present himself as the American Zola and label the three novelists as “old lions” who had “retreated, shielding their eyes against the light, and turned inward.” The unspoken, root cause of their criticisms of him, Wolfe argued, was his success—A Man in Full was a number one bestseller for ten weeks—and the three “old piles of bones” were “shaken,” fearful of becoming “effete and irrelevant.” Mailer (NYRB) and Updike (New Yorker) had written longish reviews of Wolfe’s novel; Irving made his comments on a television talk show.
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